Combining narcissistic grandiosity with the arrogance of an outlaw anarchist is a pretty good recipe for a spectacular flame-out, and there is a lesson to be learned from Barrett Brown’s pathetic fate, but most of the punks who admire Brown share his worldview, so it’s unlikely they’ll derive the correct lesson from his sad saga.

. . . Brown, who hadn’t contacted me directly in more than a year, suddenly popped up and began harassing me on Twitter in early September 2012. He accused me of libel and menaced me with threats of terrible consequences if I did not immediately respond to his demands that I answer various insulting questions. This bullying motif — “Answer my question, or else!” — is characteristic of a style that I’ve come to think of as Cargo Cult Journalism. Like the rituals of certain South Pacific islanders, the Cargo Cult Journalist hopes that his simulacrum of what he ignorantly imitates will magically bring the same result as the real thing. Cargo Cult Journalism is the kind of stuff we once encountered in smudgy mimeographed newsletters, “underground” newspaper tabloids, cheaply printed pamphlets and self-published books by crackpots who warn about conspiracies involving the Bavarian Illuminati, the Trilateral Commission and/or the Military-Industrial Complex. In the digital age, however, many people have trouble distinguishing between this kook-fringe imitation of “reporting” and genuine journalism, a distinction blurred by the increasingly shabby quality of product issued by respectable organs of the mainstream media. . . .
What one usually finds among practitioners of Cargo Cult Journalism is a grandiose posture of contempt for the unglamorous toil of the workaday reporter. Many people who have never covered a county commission meeting, a high-school basketball tournament or a Fourth of July parade — such local tedium is beneath their notice — seem to harbor Walter Mitty fantasies of gaining worldwide journalistic significance. The Internet is a medium that permits these would-be Seymour Hersh types to catapult past the minor leagues of journalism where real reporters learn their craft. While I enthusiastically encourage the burgeoning phenomenon of online citizen-journalism, it is important at the same time to discourage the type of “famewhore” act that led Barrett Brown to his pathetic fate. Thinking himself a sort of one-man Woodward and Bernstein who would heroically expose the Hidden Secrets of the Surveillance State, Brown instead exposed himself as a blundering amateur who got himself in so far over his head that he couldn’t handle the catastrophic result. . . .

Boredom is behind many incidents of cyberbullying and trolling on social media sites, according to the first major study into the matter.
Linguistics expert Dr Claire Hardaker, of Lancaster University, studied almost 4,000 online cases involving claims of trolling.

No offense to Professor Hardaker, but hers is scarcely “the first major study” of trolling. While I don’t claim that my methods are entirely scientific, I’ve been studying this phenomenon at close range ever since Charles Johnson went crazy. This stipulates the hypothetical that Charles was once sane, of course. As far-fetched as that may seem, it would be unscientific to rule it out categorically as impossible.

Of course Brown is quite insane, and there never was a “six figure book deal” – the days of large advances and guarantees to unknown authors having been long past by the time he made the claim. To the extent any information on Anonymous or LulzSec came to investigators through him, it was purely the fault of the hackers. It didn’t take a psychiatric license to see the boy was bat-guano crazy.

But naturally it is only crackpots who warn about the Bavarian Illuminati, the fakirs and conjurers that they are. It serves as a fine distraction to the real masterminds, the Thuringian Illuminati, who are behind most of what is going on today (although it is credibly alleged the Knights Templar may have involved themselves in the War of Thuringian Succession, with the takeover by the Ernestine branch of the Wettins a couple hundred years later, Catholicism would be all but eradicated in the territory).

Ah, but the sordid details are closely held secrets, better kept than those of the NSA – but I might be convinced to reveal them for, say, a six-figure book deal. Keep it to yourself, though, if the principals were to get wind of a leak, there’s no telling what might ha

Wombat_socho June 27th, 2013 @ 5:37 pm

It’s also counting Facebook “likes” that way too. :/

Charles Johnson June 27th, 2013 @ 6:40 pm

How do you know of those things? You are not authorized to speak of them!